Cupertino Restaurants - The leading mobile network for Suburban cities

TEARN media released the Cupertino Restaurant app for ordering from smartphones; with 15% of the restaurants participating. For web access, visit http://cupertino.moAPPo.com.

About Cupertino

Cupertino is a city in Santa Clara County, California in the U.S., directly west of San Jose on the western edge of the Santa Clara Valley with portions extending into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The population was 58,302 at the time of the 2010 census.

Why Cupertino as the first city for mobile commerce?

Forbes ranked it as one of the most educated, wealthy small towns. It is best known as home to the worldwide headquarters of Apple Inc, as well as the laboratory for Amazon's Kindle Fire development team of thousands. Other Fortune 1,000 companies include Seagate, Agilent, and Symantec - while hundreds of high-tech start-ups work from their Cupertino homes.

Restaurants in Cupertino

About 200 restaurants serve the various ethnic groups who live and work in Cupertino. 15% of these Casual Dining (CDR), Quick Serve (QSR), and Fine Dining (FDR) restaurants have signed on to provide smartphone access to their menus and/or payment for their orders. This list includes BBQ from Hawaii, Greece, Armenia, Mexico, and India; Chinese, Indian, Thai, Italian, Californian, Mexican, and American venues; and unusual snacks like Beard Papa or Verde Pearl Tea.

Mobile Ordering from MoAPPo

MoAPPo integrates four digital businesses with mobile apps, Wi-Fi hotspots, payment, and online ordering experiences. One of the companies dominates the Wi-Fi hotspots in Silicon Valley while another has already gained 8 million downloads.

The Cupertino Restaurants App allows users to sign-up once, save their payment data, and save time at any of their favorite restaurants.

The innovative app supports various iPhone/iPad/iPod configurations; multiple versions of Android phones; multiple Kindles from Amazon; Palm, Blackberry, and Window Mobile; and many featured phones from Nokia, Pantech, and LG. No other company provides the same level of device support for menu display.

Feedback Welcome

Try the app. Provide feedback. Watch us grow to service all Bay Area restaurants.

MoAppo Platform for Mobile Commerce

The next big wave for technology is mobile commerce. What are the platform challenges to service this pioneering market?

Designing the MoAppo system for storing a catalog of products or food items; and allowing users to order and pay for items has been a trivial problem. Designing the true killer platform requires resolving a multitude of moving parts.

Let's get started.

Engaging Animated Menu

Most menus have, at most, a single, lo-res, small picture for each food item. As a result, the menus are boring, uninteresting, and fail to engage users. In addition, most photographers will tell us that shots of food are boring, at best.

Using the unique, tested methods from our Keys by TEARN edutainment platform (ie over 8 million downloads), we crowd-source relevant, hi-res slide-shows for every product and item in a menu. This creates an engaging presentation that allows new customers to discover interesting, new dishes. The slide show easily replaces thousands of words - and get the salivary glands working.

This single feature already makes MoAppo the technical leader in mobile commerce.

Cross Platform Services Using HTML5

Most competitors choose between the WAP platform - which works on any featured phone, but without images; and native support for single platforms - like the iPhone. Neither approach has gained much success.

Using our unique, cross-platform methods for animating the menu (ie the cool, sideways elevator bounce) that supports iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Palm, Windows, advanced feature phones, and online use - extends our technical leadership far beyond any existing competitor.

Is this the right mix of cool versus functional support? Time will tell.

Secured Payment and Enterprise Reporting

A payment platform requires security against users, devices, man-in-the-middle, and server attacks. Such platforms often are burdened so badly that a single server can only handle a few hundred transactions per second.

We have chosen to use the NoSQL and NodeJS platforms that dominate the modern social media and mobile gaming technologies. With a multitude of innovations, we have produced a secured system that has unique self-healing, live-reporting, redundant paths to the end-points at retail locations; while having a robust structure that can handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. No other company matches the maturity of our platform.

Note that this is a 10,000x improvement over legacy systems.

What's Next

The system has been tested with a dozen merchants, without a single fail, over the past two months.

In summary, the MoAppo Platform has required half a dozen, patent-pending methods that supply the services for mobile commerce. Stay tuned to follow our progress with this latest venture.

State of the Web Economy 2010

Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine led another lively discussion about the future of the web. On TV, Meg Whitman says she created 15,000 jobs at eBay, enabled lots of entrepreneurs, and now wants to become the Governor of California. Thousands of blogs write daily about the future of the web.

What is the factual state of the web economy?

We collected first-hand research to estimate the state of the web economy. While some may blog about the bad economy and the new web - our data concludes that it's already alive; supporting some 600,000 entrepreneurs; and growing despite the recession.

Long Tail of Entrepreneurs

The 80-20 rule states that 80% of the rewards are earned by the top 20%. Lemming analysts would even argue for 90-10 or 99-1. I've personally wondered whether any of these analysts truly know the economic power of the 80%, 90%, or 99% in the long tail that thrives on today's web.

Who are these entrepreneurs?

• Most are statistically labeled as unemployed or moonlighting.
• Huge numbers have blogs (millions), apps (hundreds of thousands), websites, and social pages (tens of millions.)
• Many have storefronts at eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple...
• In short, entrepreneurs explore any and all sources to dig for revenues.
• Most offer consulting to support their web explorations.

Sourcing the Data

With no public reporting sources, we chose to mine the financial reports of public companies to estimate the size of this web economy. I ferreted out the advertising, app, and commerce revenues that represent the gross margins paid to the long tail.

Here's what's included:

• 100% of the payments from Google to the long tail of AdSense affiliates - while excluding distribution fees that are paid to the larger affiliates like AOL and Myspace. Google does not itemize Checkout transactions or the Android Marketplace payments in their SEC reports, which would represent additional payments collected on behalf of the long tail.
• An estimated 50% of the affiliate revenues from Yahoo that are paid to partners - large and small. Yahoo does not report payments from Yahoo retail.
• 70% of the Music (ie itunes) and Software (ie appstore) revenues reported by Apple. Although this includes revenues for Apple's own products and software; and thus, overstates what is paid to the long tail - this estimate does partially compensate the many independent appstores that don't publicly report their payments.
• eBay reports GMV (gross merchandise value) and Paypal transaction volume. These numbers tend to overlap when Paypal is used to clear the GMV purchases at eBay. Since most of the GMV and Paypal transctions involve high cost of goods, we chose a rough 10% for each revenue stream to estimate the value-added by the entrepreneur; thus estimating an average 20% gross margins for goods sold on eBay using Paypal.
• Amazon increasingly depends on third-party products where Amazon earns referral, listing, and shipping fees. Amazon charges higher referral fees for media products and lower fees for tangible products. We've estimated the gross margins earned by the long tail through Amazon for each of these product groups.
• Microsoft pays substantial Traffic Acquisition Costs (TAC); and royalties to game publishers, but does not itemize these payments in SEC reports; and has reorganized so often that its impossible to estimate the payments. Since most of the payments reward larger companies like Yahoo and EA, it does not benefit the long tail. Thus, the omission of this data in the chart above does not significantly bias the results of this research.

What's missing from the earnings of the web economy includes:

• Consulting earned by prominent bloggers, app developers, SEO consultants, and social entrepreneurs.
• Payments by the hundreds of advertising networks that are still private - including those that pay Zygna and other game developers. This also should include revenues received by Federated Media that is paid to their blog network; and Techcrunch's revenues from their events, advertising, and other creative sources, but there is no way to estimate these sources.
• Online games that don't use Paypal for monetization.
• Earnings from other app networks, that is partially covered with our over estimation of Apple payments.
• Craig's list transactions.

Am I missing significant other sources? Can you think of other factors to fully estimate the value of the web economy?

Surprising Conclusions

Here are my conclusions:

• Earnings easily exceed $10 billion a quarter. Since this estimate represents gross margins available to pay salaries and rent, the web economy is roughly three times the size of Google.
• Revenues are seasonal, reflecting the sources that includes eBay, Amazon, and Apple.
• This earning stream can sustain over 600,000 paid jobs; probably from multiple millions of participants where hundreds of thousands have already gained self sustaining status.
• We guess that most of this stream is paid to North American entrepreneurs. Asian and European entrepreneurs have their own store fronts that are not included in this study.
• About half of this stream is exported outside of North America; with the payments repatriated to North American entrepreneurs.
• In two years, Apple has become a significant payer to the long tail; and could pass eBay, Amazon, and Google in 2011.

Is the issue really about choosing among advertising revenues, commerce, or content subscriptions? Savvy entrepreneurs know to chase a little from all the above.

Why is Obama struggling with creating jobs? Perhaps Meg Whitman really knows the answer. It does not matter whether our leaders are Democrats or Republicans. What matters is that they need to be aware of and understand the growth engine that is already part of this slow economy.

Maintaining the Web Economy Index

These six companies (and dozens of new enterprises like Facebook, Motorola, HP, Cisco, ...) who seek to build app stores, must take their vision of supporting the long tail seriously. After all, entrepreneurs depend on them to make a viable living.

Conversely, the long tail needs to speak with stronger voices when web leaders make choices that adversely influences the long tail.

Do you agree?

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